Since the nation’s independence, male sex workers have been intertwined with America’s history. Their existence has been reviled, criminalized, and scapegoated, but rarely acknowledged openly. 

Throughout history, both women and men hired male sex workers to act out the desires that they couldn’t safely express in society, including extramarital and queer sex. Their services were also retained for non-sexual purposes, including by women who just needed a male companion in public. 

Tracing this story, as I do in my forthcoming book—Gigolos: An Exploration of the Men Who Sell Sex and The Women Who Buy It—offers an unusual lens into the shifting norms of sexual behavior, sexuality, and gender in the United States over the past 250 years. 

Gigolos, hustlers, and Chippendales dancers won’t get a mention in the official celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, but they’ve been here all along—and their history is American history, too.

Colonists paid other men for sex

Sex work played a role in the nation’s founding. As the famed Virginia colonist John Smith recorded in his diaries, some English settlers sailing to Jamestown in the 1600s survived by trading sex for biscuits with mercenary soldiers on the ship.

Paid sex between men continued on shore, with poor men servicing better-off colonists. Indentured servants sometimes sold sex to wealthy landowners. Anal sex was outlawed in the colonies, but rarely prosecuted. 

By the 1800s, male sex workers were working alongside women in some brothels. Their clients were mostly male, according to George Chauncey, American history professor and author of Gay New York. Paying for sex was often the only way for queer men to get the sexual experiences they desired, as soliciting a stranger could elicit violence. Some telegraph messengers and boot blacks offered sex alongside their day jobs. 

These encounters were usually clandestine. But male sex workers were visible enough in this era that Walt Whitman mentioned them in his 1856 edition of the poetry collection Leaves of Grass, writing: “Let the she-harlots and the he-harlots be prudent! Let them dance on.” 

By the 1890s, most major cities, from San Francisco to Chicago, had brothels featuring men. 

New York City had at least six of them. A Republican state assemblyman sent an investigator to document the scene. He found men “painted and powdered” who “called each other sisters.” 

Moralists of the prudish Victorian era, including the members of a Republican city committee, urged then Mayor Robert A. Van Wyck to shutter the brothels. 

“Do you know that we now have male harlots thronging the streets, who have their peculiar places of resort, which can be found as easily as any saloon can be?” the committee asked. 

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For the ladies: Enter the “gigolo”

Male sex work aimed at women emerged around the turn of 20th century, my........

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